Over-application of the Mary Sue

Warning: This contains spoilers about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Be warned before reading this.

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My warning is going to look really silly when I come back to read this post in five years from now.

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So let's talk about 'Mary Sue'. There have been people online who are claiming that the new heroine in the seventh Star Wars movie, Rey, is in some way far more of an unrealistic 'everything goes right and everyone loves her immediately' figure than, say, Luke Skywalker, or Anakin Skywalker in the prequels.

I contest this, and want to present a comparison of Luke Skywalker in the very first Star Wars movie to Rey of Star Wars 7 as proof.

• Luke started out as a sheltered farm boy, his uncle trying to keep him from all notions of adventure and struggle, hoping to make him want to stay on the farm forever.
• Rey started out scavenging for a subsistence living. She had to defend herself, she had to make her own living space, and she had to deal with a rough crowd. She protested at what little she got for the stuff she brought in, but she had no ability to negotiate, and her feeble attempt was easily rebuffed. 

• When Luke found out that he was Force-sensitive and that the only parental figures he'd ever known were murdered and his home destroyed, he took a moment in grief and sadness and then chose to go with Kenobi and learn to be a Jedi.
• When Rey found out that she was Force-sensitive and was confronted with the knowledge that her family would never come back for her, she burst into tears and ran away.

• Luke got given a one-handed blaster - granted, we know he already knew how to use some sort of two-handed desert rifle thingy. He immediately got a near-perfect hit score with it from the start, and picked off stormtroopers and other targets with ease. He had no experience with a lightsaber or anything like it, yet he was passable with it from the start and, upon one iteration of Obi-Wan telling him to 'stretch out with his feelings', was able to pull a complex move out of nothingness (the Force) and could 'almost see the remote' despite fighting blind. He also picked up the Falcon ship guns remarkably quickly.
• Rey got given a blaster, had to be taught how to use it, forgot to take the safety off when she first tried, her first shots were laughably bad, and it took her several encounters of fighting for her life before she started managing some sort of accuracy with the thing. When she got the lightsaber, she tried to use it like a spear/staff, and was finally able to pull a complex move out of nothingness (the Force) when upon the very point of death. She managed, *barely*, to temporarily take down an already doubly-wounded foe once before they were separated by explodium.

• Luke was able, within hours of spending time with Kenobi, to utterly master the "hearing the voice of your mentor from beyond the grave" knack, which was something Yoda had given Kenobi to study and learn how to do over the eighteen or so years that he was going to spend in near-complete isolation on Tatooine. Never mind simply reaching to the Force; Luke was receiving instruction straight from his master. He was the one who took out the Death Star with one Force-placed shot.
• After a period of time of direct Force manipulation on her brain (not verbal instructions trying to describe a very subjective task), Rey was able to learn-while-doing how to pull back and catch Ren unawares. After that, she managed after something like *three or four* totally unsuccessful tries to turn a Stormtrooper - the very definition of the 'weak-minded' and basically the easiest possible prey - into doing her will for about half a minute. Look at her face when she's trying to escape and when she runs into her friends. She was terrified that her tenuous grasp on the situation would fail at any time. She had nothing to do with the destruction of the Starkiller. She didn't even know it was something to be destroyed.

• Luke was able to ferry Leia across a chasm with a fancy belt grapple. 
• Rey couldn't even carry Finn back to the ship; she had to get Chewbacca to do it.

• Luke climbed into an X-Wing with nothing but planet-based bush pilot experience and Force sensitivity and mastered it immediately. He already knew how to clean and fix up droids, and was giving R2 instructions on the fly on how to keep the damaged X-Wing going.
• Rey ran into the Falcon, which she had obviously worked with and worked on in the past, with planet-based bush pilot experience and Force sensitivity, and made several very rough starts and mistakes before getting a handle on how to maneuver the darn thing, while complaining about the lack of copilot. Then, on Solo's ship, she shorted out the *wrong* group of circuits and set the xenomorph-like creatures all loose. Whoops.

• Luke's very first encounter with the Bad Guys resulted in him making a plan to rescue the Princess, coaxing a reluctant smuggler to help, and pulling it off more or less.
• Rey's very first encounter meant managing to temporarily successfully run away, nearly getting the ship destroyed in the process. Then she was instantly utterly helpless in the face of Kylo Ren, who held her in place and then dropped her *easily*. Finally, she barely managed to escape with the help of her friends.

And yet she's the Mary Sue.

(By the way, do you want to know where the inspiration for Rey's outfit came from? There was a time when Lucas considered making Luke into a girl. The concept sketches were reused for Rey, just as a set of rejected concept sketches for R2D2 were used for BB8.)

I'm tired of female characters constantly having to ride that line between Helpless Flower and Mary Sue. Padme wasn't a Mary Sue? What about Uhura? Zoe? Delenn? Susan Ivanova? Andromeda Ascendant? Cortana? For that matter, what about Galadriel? Amalthea? Kira?

I was watching the CinemaSins "Everything Wrong With" videos for a while, until I got sick and tired of a consistent theme. They 'sin' a movie for a coincidence that makes the movie possible, and then they 'sin' the movie again for making an attempt fail until it succeeds. Folks, there are a million alternate universes where She walks into any coffee shop but His... but the one in which She walked into His is the one in which the story exists. There were no doubt dozens of girls who tried to grow up as scavengers on a desert planet and died young; this is the story about the one who lived. No doubt many women joined the Resistance and died in their first firefight; this is about the one who didn't. There are plenty of Force-sensitive people who cannot adapt to danger quickly enough and are snuffed out early; this is about the one who made it.

That's what stories *are*!

Back to the Fathers

The year is 2015. The pictures and quotes have been flying all over Facebook. In 1985, we were treated to the first part of one of the most excellent trilogies ever made... Back To The Future.

In the first movie, our protagonist starts out in 1985, a beautiful, perfect 1985 that now evokes nostalgia in everyone who was born before 1990. He gets dropped into 1955 in the first movie. In the second, he travels to 2015. In the third, he winds up in 1885. The year now is 2015, and we are finding that "the future" is sadly lacking in some areas, such as hoverboards and flying cars, but surprisingly similar in others, as the writers cleverly repeated trends as has always happened in the past and seems likely to continue into the future.

What I'd like to talk about, though, is the psychology and the sociology of the show. They hit upon one solid, repeatable truth, and gave us many excellent examples of it. A father's influence is vital within his entire family.

Note: If you have not seen the trilogy, stop now. Watch it through. Then read the rest of this post.

In the first movie, Marty McFly's father is not exactly an inspiring fellow. He is harried, submissive, and detached from other people. This deficit in his own behavior shows in his entire family. His wife drinks a little too much. (That point is subtle and takes some attention to detail.) His eldest struggles along as a night worker at a fast food restaurant, and his daughter is frumpy and consistently griping about her unpopularity. Marty himself is keeping himself from a potential career (or, at least, ten minutes of fame) as a musician by his crippling insecurity. During the course of the movie, George McFly learns how to be both assertive and connected, and his entire family benefits. His wife at the movie's end is healthier and happier, and their children are all progressing slowly towards successful lives of their own.

One instance, though, does not a trend make. In the second movie, Doc notes that Marty's family falls apart and traces the origin of the problem to his son's and daughter's arrest when his son gets browbeat into participating in criminal activity. As we see a night around the McFly table, however, we know that Doc is no expert in family sociology. (Did we expect him to be?) Marty is a manipulated blowhard. His wife married him for pity (not unlike his father's wife in the beginning of the first movie) and often goes out on long trips after work without letting him know where she has gone. His children have no respect for him. They are living in a neighborhood where the cops do not like to travel after dark. We do not see the end result when Marty changes his ways, but we clearly see how his wife and children's welfare depend heavily on his own behavior.

Families need their fathers.

In the same movie, we see that the antagonist Biff appears to have an absent mother and absent father. He is raised by his grandmother. We have no idea what happened to his parents. We do see his internal frustration with his grandmother and the way he takes it out on everyone else.

When Marty returns to 1985, or, rather, the problematic 1985A in which his father is dead and Biff has married his mother, we see the effects of Biff as a father once again spreading through the entire family. His mother is so beaten down that she justifies the abuse she suffers at his hands. Marty's older brother is on parole, and his sister can't seem to handle her money at all, as she has a dangerous amount of credit card debt. Marty himself apparently keeps getting thrown out of boarding schools. You almost can't blame Biff for griping about the "perfectly good money" he wastes on these "worthless kids".

Of course, the best movie isn't a hammer meant to drive a lesson deep into your head. The series has always been primarily about how you can improve your future by what you do today. In addition, the series is smart enough to not make a good father a guarantee of good children; Marty has his own problems even under the influence of his changed father, and one of the children of Lorraine's traditional 1950's father winds up in jail. Still, the message is clear, even if it is an unintentional result of a carefully-crafted series that pursues every thread to its most logical conclusion (flying cars aside)...

Families need their fathers. Of course, not everything relies wholly upon the father. However, he definitely has a profound effect on every member of his family.

We would do well to remember this.